Two years ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia's special military operation (SVO) in Ukraine began, which turned into the largest-scale military conflict in Europe since 1945 and into one of the most severe and prolonged wars in Russian military history. On the second anniversary of its publication, Russia in Global Politics magazine publishes an article by Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), "From "special" to "Military". The lessons of two years of operation in Ukraine", which is an attempt to extract the first lessons and conclusions from the military aspects of this armed confrontation.
A column of Russian troops marching to Kiev from the north from the territory of Belarus, in the village of Lelev near Chernobyl (Kiev region), 02/24/2022 (c) video from a surveillance camera / Greenpeace
At the beginning of the third year of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine, it can be stated that the events that began in February 2022, like any major war of the last centuries, led to the collapse of many ideas, theories and authorities in the political and military fields. The initiators, the main participants, and observers from all sides received and saw what they did not plan and did not expect.
Two years of fighting outline the contours of revolutionizing changes in military affairs, perhaps determining the appearance of war and the art of war for the entire XXI century.
The failed "Danube"
Going back to the beginning, we can conclude that the plan of the campaign really provided for a special operation in the first place, and already in the second - a military operation, and assumed that the task could be solved without large-scale military operations and organized military resistance. Future historians will answer why Moscow considered it possible to implement such a scenario, especially given that the Armed forces of Ukraine (AFU) have been waging a continuous "small" war in Donbass since 2014. The plan itself is recognizable and, in fact, reproduced the Soviet plan for the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968, known as Operation Danube. It corresponded to the main elements of the SVO's plan, including the seizure of the capital's airport by landing, followed by the transfer of airborne units there to block the capital and massive rapid marches of armored and mechanized units to large cities to block them and subsequent rapid "cleansing" by forces of "light units", special forces and special services.
The difference between the circumstances of the Danube and the February 2022 operation was not only that the political leadership of Ukraine and the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine resisted. The "Danube" was conducted by a powerful mobilized grouping of troops of the Warsaw Pact Organization, which significantly exceeded the forces of the Czechoslovak People's Army. The initiators of the SVO went to the introduction of troops into the state, which far surpassed Czechoslovakia in area, by a limited group estimated at about 185 thousand people (although it included most of the Russian Ground Forces and airborne forces), or about 140 battalion tactical groups. Even taking into account the mobilization of the DPR and LPR forces (about 110 thousand more), it was inferior in number to the armed forces and law enforcement agencies of Ukraine, already partially mobilized. The mobilization of the primary reserve, which began in Ukraine the day before the start of its operation, replenished the Armed Forces of Ukraine in a matter of days with 150 thousand servicemen with combat experience in Donbass (participants in the "anti-terrorist operation" - "Operation of the United Forces") and allowed to complement the main brigades of the first line, made the balance of forces completely unfavorable for Russia.
Under these conditions, the outcome of the first stage of the SVO was determined by the balance of forces alone. The Russian groups scattered in eight directions were quickly stopped and forced to engage in battles with a numerically superior enemy. In the north, the main strike groups of the SVO forces, advancing from Belarus through the Pripyat marshes and from Russian territory through the Sumy and Chernihiv regions, reached Kiev, but could neither block it (let alone occupy it) nor provide their stretched communications. The landing in Gostomel, in conditions of fierce resistance and shelling, turned from a bridgehead into a trap. In the Kharkov direction, the troops were stopped at the approaches to Kharkov and at the border line. Attempts by hastily mobilized and insufficiently equipped forces of the DPR and LPR to push back the Ukrainian forces entrenched since 2014 from the line of contact in Donbass have proved unsuccessful. The inability to suppress the Ukrainian air defense sharply limited the effectiveness of Russian aviation over the entire front line and territory of Ukraine, depriving the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of one of the main trump cards.
The greatest successes have been achieved in the south, where, apparently, some "negotiators", "sleeping" agents and supporters of Russia worked (and only there). This allowed the troops that left the Crimea to occupy the territories of the Kherson and southern parts of the Zaporozhye regions in a matter of days with minimal resistance from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to reach Mariupol in the east, and in the west to develop an offensive against Nikolaev and bypassing it from the north to Odessa. However, these two main prizes of the Black Sea region could not be obtained. Amphibious assault ships with marine forces assembled in advance from all three European fleets of the Russian Navy were stopped by mines and "unexpectedly" anti-ship missiles of Ukraine's own production "Neptune". The Armed Forces of Ukraine, which recovered on land, quickly stopped the advanced forces of the Russian troops, who took rather suddenness from Nikolaev and Voznesensk, and by mid-March they were pushed back to the border of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions.
Russia found itself in a state of large-scale war on a huge front with a numerous and well-armed enemy, to whose aid all the powers of the West came, imposed unprecedented economic sanctions and began massive and increasing arms supplies to Kiev.
The most problematic from the very beginning was the Kiev direction, where, in fact, the grouping of troops of two military districts of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation was "planted" in forests and swamps around Kiev with no visible prospects for its effective use and with a constant risk to communications "strung" on forest roads through Sumy and Chernihiv regions, which actually remained under control Kiev forces. There was not enough grouping to capture and even cover and besiege Kiev. By and large, only the extreme slowness and lack of receptivity of the Ukrainian command and the Armed Forces prevented the situation in the Kiev direction from developing into an acute crisis for the Russian side. With a more energetic opponent, Russian troops near Kiev would face a repeat of Warsaw 1920.
The Russian command realized the situation, already somewhere in the middle of March 2022, a decision was made to withdraw troops from Kiev, by April 5 they had completely withdrawn from the Kiev, Sumy and Chernihiv regions and from the north of the Kharkiv region beyond the borders of Ukraine. In fact, this is where the campaign with decisive goals in Ukraine can be considered completed, since its main goal was, obviously, the capture of Kiev. The Russian leadership, of course, presented the withdrawal of troops from near Kiev and from the north of Ukraine as an "act of goodwill" during the peace talks in Istanbul. Apparently, it was this "act" - and not Boris Johnson's intrigues - that led to the collapse of the Istanbul talks. The retreat of the army from the enemy's capital has never served a compromise peace.
Kiev considered the withdrawal of Russian troops from the north a triumph of the policy of resistance and perceived it as a turning point, deciding that it would be able to achieve the complete expulsion of Russian troops. This was supported by a wave of Western socio-political and military support, which peaked in the spring of 2022. On May 9, 2022, the US Congress even passed the lend-lease law for Ukraine, theoretically opening access to an unlimited amount of American military assistance. The West believed in the possibility of using a set of military and economic measures to inflict a "strategic defeat" on Russia, which, under favorable conditions, could lead to a change of power in Moscow.
After an unsuccessful attempt to compromise out of the war and receiving a number of painful blows (on April 13-14, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, the missile cruiser Moskva, was sunk), the Russian side could only continue the military campaign, rethinking the goals and possibilities. As far as can be judged, the new plan provided for the use of troops withdrawn from the north of Ukraine to completely liberate the territory of the DPR and LPR and, possibly, partially encircle the AFU forces on the Left Bank of Ukraine. Presumably, the achievement of these tasks was considered possible by May-June. Since mid-March 2022, an offensive has been underway in the Izyum area, intensified in April; the initial plan, apparently, was to reach the rear of the Severodonetsk AFU group through Slavyansk and a more ambitious and large-scale offensive towards Zaporozhye to meet Russian forces in the south. In the future, offensive actions began in several more directions in the Kharkiv region and the LPR. However, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation faced a serious shortage of forces and resources. After the withdrawal of part of the battalion tactical groups to replenish in the Russian Federation, by mid-April 2022, the Russian Armed Forces had no more than a hundred thinned BTGs to the entire front line, and BTGs transferred from the northern direction were put into battle alternately, without giving the necessary build-up of forces.
In Ukraine, in March 2022, the third wave of mobilization was announced, extending to graduates of military departments and persons who had not previously served in military service, which by mid-April brought the number of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to 400 thousand people, not counting those in training, and by the end of May - up to 600 thousand people. Thus, the Armed Forces of Ukraine gained significant numerical superiority over the combined grouping of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the forces of the DPR and LPR and the PMCs, and the Russian offensive was conducted, in fact, against a numerically superior enemy.
An important factor in the first stage of hostilities was the struggle for Mariupol from March 2 to May 16, 2022. The siege of the city became a harbinger of future "positionality" in this conflict and shackled the 30,000-strong grouping of "allied forces", largely determining the impossibility of developing Russian successes in the south or offensive actions near Donetsk. The offensive of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the Izyum direction, due to the lack of superiority in forces over the enemy, also developed slowly and heavily, and as a result, instead of encirclements, it simply came down to "pushing out" the enemy at the tactical level. At the beginning of May 2022, Russian forces faced serious difficulties and losses in attempts to force the Seversky Donets near Belogorovka, when the "traditional" methods of massing forces and means were revealed to be inoperable in the conditions of this war. By early July 2022, after the occupation of Lisichansk, the Russian offensive had run out of steam. Almost the entire territory of the Luhansk region (LPR) and the eastern part of the Kharkiv region was occupied, but Ukraine still had most of the Donetsk region (DPR). It was not possible to reach even Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. This campaign drained the forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, which basically remained a group that entered Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine has launched a "permanent mobilization", gaining an increasingly tangible numerical superiority.
The road to positionality
By the end of spring and early summer of 2022, Ukraine's receipt of Western weapons and technical means became the determining factors of the fighting. From the very beginning, the enormous intelligence capabilities of the West were put into the service of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which ensured superiority in intelligence and targeting. This is especially true for space exploration, provided by a complex of Western military reconnaissance satellites and numerous commercial satellite Western companies - suppliers of geo-images. This allows you to monitor the combat zone and the territory of the Russian Federation continuously and practically in real time.
Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink "universal" satellite Internet system quickly became the key Ukrainian combat control and data transmission system, catapulting the AFU into the 21st century. With the ability to function at any point, distribute streaming information to a huge number of individual consumers, maintain Internet connectivity in motion and control vehicles at any distance, Starlink gave the military capabilities that even the US armed forces expected to receive no earlier than the mid-2030s. With Starlink, it has become a reality to connect any "unit" to the network anywhere, exchange video streams online, create combat chats and other control systems for data exchange between thousands of subscribers in real time, high secrecy of communication due to a narrowly focused satellite communication channel, the ability to use Wi-Fi to supply networks for tactical communication in each access point. In fact, every combat "unit" and every firearm, when connected to Starlink, turned into network-centric ones with real-time targeting, guidance and correction capabilities and with the potential of high-precision weapons.
155-mm modern long-range artillery and HIMARS and MLRS ground-based missile systems with high-precision GMLRS rockets with a range of up to 90 km, which began to be used from the end of June 2022, in combination with the above-mentioned reconnaissance, target designation and network-centric means of communication, control and data transmission, allowed the Ukrainian side to gain fire superiority in the second half of 2022 and the possibility of a high-precision long-range strike, significantly complicating the situation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
The main result of the use of the HIMARS APU with GMLRS missiles in the summer of 2022 was not so much the destruction of headquarters and ammunition depots, as attacks on the locations of military units and reserves. The Russian side had to pull reserves deep into the controlled territory, and partially even into the territory of the Russian Federation. Combined with the general shortage of forces in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the numerical superiority of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, this was the prerequisite for a successful Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv region in September 2022. Unable to quickly and effectively bring the drawn-out reserves into battle, the Russian side left the eastern part of the Kharkiv region and built a line from the introduced reserve forces on the western border of the LPR, on which the Ukrainian raid was stopped and which formed the basis of the front line in the north, which still exists today.
Ukraine's first real military success has acutely posed to Moscow the problem of the discrepancy between the size of the grouping and the potential of the enemy. On September 21, 2022, the Russian leadership had to undertake partial mobilization for the first time in the post-Soviet period, calling for more than 300 thousand people. At the same time, carte blanche was given for a sharp increase in the number of the Wagner PMCs, which actually began to turn into a parallel army, including through mass recruitment of prisoners in prisons - by January 2023, the number of Wagner reached 50,000 people.
All these measures began to have an effect only by the end of 2022. In the meantime, the Russian troops were lined up in a stretched "thin red line." And in the autumn of 2022, Ukraine, which found itself at the peak of a favorable balance of forces for it, had a unique chance to inflict a number of significant defeats on the Russian side with a possible large-scale political effect.
Ukraine could either continue offensive actions already on the territory of the LPR, or try to make a breakthrough from Zaporozhye to the Sea of Azov in the south, cutting off Russian forces in the Kherson region and reaching the northern part of the Crimea. It is unclear why Kiev refused such advantageous directions for it - whether it was the dictatorship of the cautious and passivity-prone Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny or, according to a number of new reports, the result of pressure from the Americans, who were skeptical about the APU's ability to take such large-scale actions. Instead of an offensive with decisive goals, the Ukrainian side aimed at a more limited and at the same time opportunistically politically advantageous task of squeezing Russian forces out of Kherson, the only regional center of Ukraine that Russia occupied at the beginning of its war.
Russian troops on the west bank of the lower Dnieper River were supplied via several bridges, which became targets of precision strikes by GMLRS missiles. However, the Ukrainian attacks on Russian positions near Kherson in September-November 2022 proved to be ineffective, were accompanied by significant losses and became the first large-scale demonstration of the positional deadlock, which fully manifested itself the following year. Nevertheless, the damage to the bridges across the Dnieper by rocket attacks played a role. Fearing a supply crisis, the Russian command, on the initiative of the commander of the Joint Grouping of Russian Troops (forces), who became in October In Ukraine, Army General Sergei Surovikin decided on November 9 to leave Kherson and withdraw troops from the right bank of the Dnieper. The withdrawal was carried out within two days with a high degree of organization and secrecy and practically without losses.
For Ukraine, the liberation of Kherson, carried out without fighting in the city itself, was a major military and political success, sharply raising its shares in the West. They came to the conclusion that with the provision of large-scale military assistance to Ukraine, it will be able to dislodge Russian troops on its own, at least until the borders on February 24, 2022. Since the end of 2022, Western military supplies to Ukraine have begun to increase dramatically, including the first deliveries of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. A training and training program was also launched in the West for 12 Ukrainian brigades. The Ukrainian military leadership, having received large replenishments of people and equipment, began a large-scale build-up of the combat potential and strength of the Armed Forces, including the formation of formations. By the spring of 2023, the number of the Ukrainian Defense Forces (AFU and other law enforcement agencies) exceeded one million people, and a hundred combat brigades.
After partial mobilization and an increase in the influx of contractors, the Russian command also completed the staffing of forces in the area of its military and began forming new formations, announcing plans to increase the number of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the future to one and a half million military personnel. Apparently, relying on the fruits of mobilization, in the winter of 2022-2023, Moscow hesitated between the options of an "optimistically offensive" and a "cautiously defensive" strategy in Ukraine. The test of the "optimistic-offensive" option was expressed in the offensive in the Soledar-Bakhmut direction (since November), in which the main striking role went to the Wagner PMCs. On January 10, 2023, Soledar was taken, after fierce fighting that lasted until May 20, Bakhmut.
The Russian offensive, which lasted for almost six months, was accompanied by heavy fighting with little territorial progress and the almost complete destruction of occupied cities. This demonstrated the new look of the fighting, which was becoming more and more positional. At the end of winter and early spring of 2023, the Russian side tried to conduct a number of local offensives in the Donbas - near Donetsk, in Marinka, on Ugledar, but they resulted in stubborn positional battles and had little or no results, as in Ugledar.
All this led the Russian command to make the final and most rational choice in favor of a defensive campaign strategy for 2023 based on positional defense. Since the early spring of 2023, large-scale construction of a network of field positions and fortifications, called the Surovikin Line, has been underway on the Russian side of the front, while reserves were being accumulated. To replenish the troops, a plan was put forward to attract 420 thousand contract soldiers to the army during the year, who were offered a high salary.
Ukraine is losing its last chance
By the beginning of 2023, Ukraine had, in principle, significant chances of success of offensive actions. The Russian army in the combat zone was experiencing not only a significant shortage of personnel (the effect of mobilization was just beginning to affect), but also a shortage of military equipment. Already in the summer and autumn of 2022, the Russian side began a massive withdrawal from storage bases of outdated models of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery, including samples from the 1950s and 1960s, which miraculously survived the "cuts" of post-Soviet times, but this only partially corrected the situation. According to the sensational leak of the files of the US Department of Defense Intelligence Agency (RUMO) through the Discord social network in the middle of last year, on February 28, 2023, Russian troops had 419 tanks, 2,928 armored vehicles and 1,209 artillery systems on the line of contact. The AFU had 809 tanks, 3,498 armored vehicles and 2,331 artillery systems. The Russian side also experienced a serious shortage of ammunition.
Thus, apparently, the first three months of 2023 were the time of the best balance of forces for the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the greatest decline in the combat potential of the Russian army. However, the Ukrainian leadership constantly postponed the start of the offensive, waiting for the arrival of the maximum number of Western military equipment and the completion of the training of new brigades in the West. The opposing side did not sit idly by, and the balance of power began to shift. But the magic of Western technology and "Western methods" was so great that it gave Ukrainians a sense of self-confidence and disregard for the enemy.
March, April, and May passed, and it was only at the beginning of June that the Ukrainian forces finally went into action.
Although many expected some non-standard and creative moves from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (or rather, from their Western planners), the Ukrainian command launched an offensive on June 4 along the most obvious and promising most operational and strategic success direction from Zaporozhye south to the Sea of Azov - where the Russian side prepared best. The division of the Ukrainian strike in the south between two directions - Orekhovsky, conditionally to Melitopol, and Vremyevsky, conditionally to Temryuk and Berdyansk - could still be understood. But at the same time, the AFU began to advance in a completely separate third direction in the north, seeking to regain the lost Bakhmut. Some of the most experienced brigades were involved there, while in the south, the main contribution was made by newly formed brigades that had undergone Western training. The meaning of the dispersion of forces between the main southern direction and Bakhmut remained unclear both to observers and, judging by American media reports, to Pentagon curators.
The Ukrainian command has created a magical cocktail of delayed preparation, lack of operational and strategic surprise, dispersion of forces and disregard for the enemy.
In theory, all this could have been offset by tactical successes on the front line, but it did not work out either. Positionality manifested itself on a global scale - attacking columns and formations of armored vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine hit mines, crowded together, and became objects of beating with the use of ATGM, artillery and drones. Despite the advantages of the Ukrainians due to the assistance of the West in reconnaissance and targeting and the availability of high-precision weapons, it was not possible to achieve effective fire superiority and suppression of Russian artillery in the APU offensive zone. As a result, the offensive in the south resulted in a slow, bloody "gnawing" of Russian positions, already from the second half of June, Ukrainians stopped relying on vaunted Western armored vehicles and switched to purely infantry assault operations in small units.
In the Orekhovsky direction, the village of Rabodino, which, according to Ukrainian plans, was supposed to be taken on the first day of the offensive, was occupied by Ukrainians only by the end of August. During September, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were able to advance another couple of kilometers south-east of Rabotino, where the offensive finally ran out of steam. To the east, in the Vremyevsky direction, in June, the Ukrainians were able to cut off the so-called Vremyevsky ledge, which extended into their positions for several kilometers, but in the next three months they managed to advance only 2-3 km to the south. By the end of the summer, in fierce battles, the AFU "bent" the front line several kilometers south of Bakhmut, but there could be no question of any encirclement, much less the capture of the city. Contrary to popular belief, the notorious "Surovikin line" played practically no role in repelling the Ukrainian offensive in the south - in most cases, Ukrainians simply did not reach it, with the exception of one section south-east of Rabodino.
The internal political upheaval in Russia, which was so expected by Ukraine, did not help either - the mutiny of the Wagner PMCs that broke out on June 23-24. The clueless performance of the Wagner executives, who did not fully understand what they wanted, quickly "deflated" and, as usual with such outcomes, led to the consolidation and strengthening of the positions of the Russian authorities.
For Ukraine, the failure of the 2023 summer offensive was a symptom of a fundamental military-political crisis that demonstrated the lack of real means and resources for a military victory over Russia.
It is the understanding of this that causes the wavering of Western countries regarding the volume of military assistance. If the results of the 2022 campaign gave Kiev a large loan of military and political trust in the West, then the 2023 campaign largely deprived it. Even with new large-scale Western military supplies, the uniquely advantageous balance of forces for Ukraine at the turn of 2022-2023 will never happen again.
The last chord of the Ukrainian offensive actions in 2023, and, as can be judged, undertaken primarily to demonstrate at least some success to the West, were the landings in September-October by small forces on the left bank of the lower reaches of the Dnieper, which allowed the formation of several small bridgeheads. These bridgeheads, however, turned out to be a dead end from an operational point of view, since they reproduced the very positionality that bound and paralyzed the rest of the front.
At a dead end
Another side of the failure of the Ukrainian offensive in the summer of 2023 was the inability to "grind" and exhaust significant forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The Russian army retained its main forces and reserves, which made it possible to move to the intensification of actions at the front. Already in early July 2023, Russian troops launched an offensive in the north in the Kupyansk direction, seeking to recapture some of the territories lost in September 2022. Although the successes turned out to be small, since the autumn of 2023, as the Ukrainian offensive faded, Russian forces launched a series of attacks along almost the entire front, quickly forcing the AFU to lose the initiative and go on the defensive.
The most significant of the Russian offensives since the beginning of October 2023 has been aimed at Avdiivka, a western suburb of Donetsk that has been firmly held by the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2014. Even the success achieved there, together with the ongoing Russian attacks in various areas, demonstrate the lack of means to decisively overcome positionalism. Nevertheless, the Russian side maintains large-scale pressure on Ukrainian positions almost along the entire length of the line of operations in the zone of its own defense, creating tactical crises for the Armed Forces in a number of areas. Apparently, the active strategy of "inflicting multiple cuts" on the enemy is designed to exhaust the Armed Forces and create prerequisites for "loosening" the Ukrainian front and achieving more significant successes. However, this strategy is very expensive for the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in terms of losses and expenditure of resources and can lead to excessive exhaustion of forces, which, in turn, will again transfer at least part of the initiative to the Ukrainian side - which is probably what Kiev's calculations are based on now.
Deep positionality, combined with a lack of strength on both sides, condemns them to a long-term positional struggle in 2024. Both sides, as the struggle over the course of the year has shown, are unable to translate tactical successes into operational ones. Now the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are holding the initiative practically along the entire front line, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine have switched to strategic defense, which is still quite stable and nowhere gives the Russian troops the opportunity to achieve anything more than private tactical successes. Ukrainian troops also retain significant reserves, including the bulk of the Western heavy weapons received in 2023, and expect to receive Western F-16 fighter combat aircraft. At the same time, political uncertainty regarding further amounts of military assistance (primarily from the United States) does not allow Kiev to form clear campaign plans for 2024 and forces it to adopt a wait-and-see strategy. The main problem for the Armed Forces of Ukraine is not so much the lack of weapons and ammunition, as the reluctance of the Ukrainian leadership for political reasons to deploy a full-fledged mobilization of the male population under 25 years of age (now only persons over 30 years of age are subject to mobilization).
The potential of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in 2024 will also be largely determined by the willingness of the country's leadership to resort to new mobilization measures, since the recruitment potential at the expense of contractors is decreasing.
By the beginning of 2024, both sides apparently had a comparable number of forces at the front - Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the presence of more than 600 thousand people "in the zone of their own", Ukrainian and Western estimates give for the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation about 400-450 thousand people directly on the line of operations. By the end of 2023, Ukrainian official sources estimated the number of the so-called Defense Forces of Ukraine at about 1.1 million people, including up to 800 thousand in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Apparently, there were a number of people at the front comparable to those cited for Russia.
In general, as far as can be judged, the ground forces of both sides are at the same or comparable level of organization, armament, training, command staff, culture, morale and other things - representing in a sense "one people".
Both sides are fighting in approximately the same style and, apparently, with a comparable level of casualties.
Immediate prospects
Both belligerents and the West are not ready for a peaceful settlement, a military-political situation is developing similar to the positional period of the Korean War in 1951-1953 - the outcome that the Central Committee predicted in a number of notes and comments in the event of a possible Russian-Ukrainian war back in 2021 and early 2022. The positional deadlock can be overcome either by a sharp build-up of troops to gain multiple numerical superiority over the enemy, or by military-technical superiority - primarily a significant increase in the number and potential of high-precision weapons. Both are likely to be unattainable by both sides in the near future.
This makes a protracted war inevitable with relatively stable fronts in the style of the Korean or Iran-Iraq war. It will be conducted for years, attrition, not with the hope of forcing the enemy to compromise, but rather in anticipation of internal changes in him that will lead to a change in political position. The end of the Korean War in 1953, even under the conditions of the status quo, became possible only after the death of Joseph Stalin. Accordingly, for Ukraine and the West, the condition for change seems to be Vladimir Putin's departure from power in one form or another (extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future), while the Russian leadership apparently pinns its hopes on a possible change of power in the United States in the elections in November 2024. Therefore, Moscow most likely intends to continue fighting at least until 2025, and possibly beyond, in anticipation of achieving powerful military superiority over Ukraine.
After the failure of the Ukrainian offensive in 2023, Ukraine and the West found themselves without a clear war strategy. Implicitly, the main goal of the offensive was to create an internal political crisis in the Russian Federation and, as a maximum, regime change in Moscow. In fact, Ukraine and the West bet on the jackpot in the spring of 2022, which did not fall out, and now it is unclear what to do next. For Ukraine and the West, the choice is between two options: to continue the "war against Putin" for a long time with unclear prospects and the constant threat of escalation, or to agree to a Korean-style truce on the terms of the status quo. Both options, in fact, suggest postponing a real peaceful settlement to the post-Putin era in the hope of "more realistic leadership in Moscow." So far, Vladimir Zelensky, most of the Ukrainian elite and the West reject the "Korean" version of the truce. This means that in 2024, the parties intend to "give the war another chance" and continue to test their strength already in a positional struggle for stress testing of resource capabilities and political will.
In conditions of deadlock at the front and in an effort to exert primarily political pressure on the enemy, increased attention will be paid to politically sensitive and propagandistically significant attacks on each other's rear facilities, increasingly shifting to the "war of cities" in the spirit of the Iran-Iraq War. This trend is clearly noticeable on the Ukrainian side, including in the form of its constant demands from the West for long-range weapons. So we can expect that civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure will increase. Russian resources are significant, but simply increasing the production and repair of outdated tanks, artillery systems and shells will not ensure military success, but will only turn the war into a permanent one, with many years of colossal expenditure of national wealth and sooner or later negative socio-economic and domestic political consequences. The turning point can only ensure the saturation of the armed forces with modern means of combat, primarily high-precision and unmanned, as well as reconnaissance, targeting and electronic warfare. This is a non-trivial task from both a technological and military-industrial point of view. Russia is unlikely to be able to do without cheap and palliative political, military and industrial solutions. The radical "stress test", launched on February 24, 2022, the system will have to go through to the end.